Back on April 17th of this year, Eddie B. dropped the RV 2.0 media player on the world. Since then, thanks to you, we’ve received a great deal of feedback on the player. Furthermore, we’ve been giving it a lot of thought internally. After over three months of minor tweaks, we’ve decided to perform some rather major reconstructive surgery on our beloved media player in hopes that we can continue to improve the overall browsing and shopping experiences at RV.
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The single most important bit of feedback we received regarding the media player is that many users were unaware of its existence. While we were all proud of our shiny, new player, it turned out that a number of regular users (and presumably many new users) were not able to use the player at all. Obviously, an unused media player seemed a bit tragic to us. So, we went back to the drawing board and re-designed the process by which users interact with the player. The rest of this post will detail the changes and improvements we’ve made.
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Nobody Likes Managers Anyway
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In its original incarnation, the media player was governed by a “Playlist Manager”. The manager exhibited your playlist and allowed you to delete the items and launch the player. While this was a good idea in theory, it proved a bit trying in practice. Why would you want to click a button to launch a player after you’ve already added tracks to your playlist? You told us this was counterintuitive and we listened. So, we threw the manager under the bus. She’s gone. Oh I, Oh I’d pay the devil to replace her. That’s not true. I wouldn’t do anything devily.

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Now, when you want to play a track, click on one of our shiny new play buttons (designed by Sam) and your track, release or list will pop right up in the media player. Simple as pie. No middle man. No manager.
So, be on the lookout for the following buttons:

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Do More With Your Media Player
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While the media player still resides in a pop-up window, you can now do more from the media player window:
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Click on the currently playing track or mix title, release name, artist name or uploader name to be taken to the respective detail page in the site window.
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Click the add to cart button next to a track listing to add the track to your cart. Or click the buy list button to purchase every track in the playlist.
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Click the download button to download network tracks and mixes.
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Click the trash can button to remove a track or mix from the playlist.
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Simpler is Better
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Nobody likes techno-babble, so I’ll spare you and will provide a quick high-level overview: media player 2.0 was controlled by a bevy of interconnected moving parts. Simpler is almost always better.
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So, we further simplified the player by removing a layer of Flash interaction. Although this is largely transparent to the user, it means that the media player will respond to your every desire. Or, at the very least, it will queue your tracks when you tell it to. Although we encourage you to USE ANY BROWSER OTHER THAN INTERNET EXPLORER (emphasis not mine, but placed by the gods of the interwebs), the media player will now work seamlessly in IE7. However, if you are using IE7, you could do yourself a great favor by upgrading to a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please upgrade immediately. Pretty please.
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We will continue to refine the media player as we have all kinds of grand plans for it. However, we hope that the current incarnation represents a great leap forward. While we work to implement some of our ideas, we hope that you will share your feedback with us. It might sound trite, but we really do value any and all feedback regarding the media player (and the RV site in general). So, please feel free to contact us with your questions, complaints and recommendations.
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Cuddn’ Johnny